Who doesn’t love a good podcast? Picture yourself sinking into a comfy couch, clad in pajamas with a glass of wine, chowing down on hummus and pita chips, and getting caught up on “Serial.”

Now, switch out the PJs for a suit or a dress, toss the snacks and cram yourself into a seat with just enough leg room for Jiminy Cricket. Add 800 strangers. Happy? How about if you paid $145 for that?

The one-man show “The Encounter,” which opened Thursday on Broadway, is exactly that — a public podcast, complete with high-quality headphones for every theatergoer and enough yawns for an anesthesia symposium.

The perfect night out for the nose-up, pinky-out set, “This American Life-less Bore” is a vocal trek through the Amazon, detailing real-life US photojournalist Loren McIntyre’s time in Brazil and Peru and his interactions with the Mayoruna people there.

In brief: “Dances With Wolves” with drug trips and no intermission.

Broadway has seen many solo shows — fine ones, with entertainers like Dame Edna, Hugh Jackman and Liza Minnelli. Simon McBurney, the creator and star of “The Encounter” and artistic director of the UK-based theater company Complicité, is no entertainer. He’s a peddler of pretentious, self-satisfied wisdom and overhyped novelty.

“If I’m to survive,” his McIntyre whispers, “I must pump out of my psyche a massively self-generated sense of who I am.”

This intermissionless, nearly two-hour snoozefest has a massively self-generated sense of what it is.

Robbie Jack

The show fancies itself an immersive-style revolution, blending tech and story. But the audience I saw it with Wednesday night left without talking about the characters, the plot or the ideas. Rather, they rattled on about the damn headphones.

And that’s why a show like “The Encounter” doesn’t work on Broadway. Although the headsets may be aurally impressive, they put a wedge between theatergoers. Over at “Hamilton” and “The Color Purple,” crowds are sobbing together. At “The Book of Mormon,” they’re howling. But at “The Encounter,” they’re wearing headphones and nodding off. There’s simply no investment.

“The Encounter” would work better as a podcast, where a listener can focus on the words, and pause and rewind in private. Instead it’s been slapped onstage with 77 water bottles and a microphone shaped like a severed head.

Margaret Thatcher once said, “Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live.” This must be the sentiment that drives Anglophiliac theatergoers to torture themselves again and again.